David says his hope is to see the glory and power of God in the wilderness, just as surely as he sees it in the temple in Jerusalem. He's saying that he doesn't need a building to find God, he doesn't need priests to find God, he doesn’t need sacrifices to find God, and here it comes - he doesn’t need a pastor to find God! You see friends, God wants to have a relationship with you, with no mediator other than God Himself named Jesus. Isn't that cool?!

Look what David says in verse 4, “Your lovingkindness is better than life.” You might want to circle the word lovingkindness; it's the Hebrew word “hesed.” It is the word for unconditional love in the Old Covenant. The Old Covenant word for “agape.”

We need to stop right there friends and really think about what he’s saying here, “Your lovingkindness is better than life.” Let’s talk about life; aren’t our lives our most precious possessions, the thing we hang on to at all costs? If a robber came up and pointed a gun at you, what would you do? You'd give him your wallet! Why? Because your life is more important than your money. If you get the dreaded word, “cancer,” what are you going to do? You're going to go through drastic surgery, you’ll take hideous chemicals into your body, why? To save your life! We fight for life with all we have. The Old Testament book of Job says exactly that in chapter 2, verse 4, “All that a man has, he will give for his life.” And it’s true.

What David says is radical, “Your love is even better than the choicest thing in my life called life itself. How can he say that? Well, let's think about it, what good is life without the love of God?

One of the things that brought me to Christ almost forty years ago now, was a little gospel tract that I received from a church I visited. It was called, “Is this all there is to life?” I opened it up after I had visited, I wasn't a Christian yet, but this is what it said on the first page, “A man is born, goes to school, gets married, gets a job, has kids, retires, and then dies; is that all there is to life?” That got me thinking, what is man really? Is he really just a bunch of protoplasm waiting to become manure? Or is there more to this thing? And that sent me on my search to find God.

What David finds, and his son Solomon wrote these words, “All of life is a vanity unless God is a part of it.” And so David, who knows the love of God, says, “My Lips are going to praise you.” And don't forget where he is when he says this, he's in the wilderness! His circumstances have not changed, all that has changed is his mindset - he's gone vertical.

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